11-13-2012 National:
Site posts leaked nude photos without consent, charges $250 to take them down.
In the era of Polaroid cameras, you didn't have to worry too much about a racy snapshot you took in the privacy of your bedroom becoming available to the general public. But thanks to the rise of digital cameras and the Internet, that's now a real risk. Hackers, disgruntled exes, and other vindictive individuals who gain access to your compromising digital snapshots can share them with the world with a single click.
Recently, a number of websites have sprung up to cash in on the public humiliation of others. One of the first such sites was IsAnyoneUp, which solicited nude pictures of ordinary Americans submitted by third parties. To maximize the humiliation, the photos were posted along with identifying details such as name and home town. The site's owner, Hunter Moore, reportedly raked in thousands of dollars a month in advertising revenue, and he made the rounds on television talk shows defending his site.
Moore finally shuttered the site earlier this year, but others have jumped in to fill the sordid niche he pioneered. One such site is the creatively named IsAnybodyDown. Like the original, it features naked pictures of ordinary Americans, generally submitted without the subjects' consent, as well as personal information such as their names, hometowns, phone numbers, and screenshots of their Facebook pages.
Sleazy, yes—but is it extortion?
If you think IsAnyoneUp couldn't be any sleazier, then IsAnybodyDown's seems determined to prove you wrong. A link on IsAnybodyDown reading "Get Me Off This Site!" leads to the website of "Takedown Hammer," an "independent third party team" that, for a modest fee of $250, will "issue a successful content removal request on your behalf." It brags of 90 successful removals from IsAnybodyDown.com.
It seems pretty obvious that "Takedown Hammer" isn't actually independent of IsAnybodyDown. Indeed, copyright and First Amendment attorney Marc Randazza has found circumstantial evidence that IsAnybodyDown and Takedown Hammer are, in fact, both owned by a man named Craig Brittain. ...continued... by Timothy B. Lee
November 13, 2012
"Involuntary porn" site tests the boundaries of legal extortion
September 3, 2011
Hacker gets 6 years in prison for 'sextortion' scheme
9-3-2011 California:
A California man was sentenced to six years in prison for hacking into dozens of computers, stealing personal information and demanding naked images from female victims in exchange for not releasing the stolen information.
Luis Mijangos, 32, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who was living in Santa Ana, California, was engaged in "cyberterrorism" and "sextortion," federal prosecutors said.
He pleaded guilty to charges of computer hacking and wiretapping in March. He was sentenced Thursday during a court hearing in which two of his victims spoke, and one compared her experience to being the victim of domestic violence.
Authorities said he hacked into more than 100 computers by tricking people to download software that allowed him to take control of their computers. He listened to victims through the computers' microphones, read their emails and watched them through their webcams.
He also obtained explicit pictures of many of them.
He threatened the victims by saying he would post the pictures on the Internet if the victim did not send him more explicit videos.
"When one victim shared Mijangos 'sextortionate' threats with a friend, Mijangos responded by posting nude pictures of the victim on her MySpace page," prosecutors said.
Forty-four of the victims were juveniles.
"We now live in a world gone digital, relying on our personal computers for everything from banking, to learning, to intimate communications with friends and family," said United States Attorney Andre Birotte Jr.
" Mijangos invaded the sanctity of many personal digital worlds and used intimate content to victimize and prey upon unsuspecting victims." ..Source.. by CNN
May 10, 2009
Internet, sex addictions go hand in hand
5-10-2009 National:
In more than 10 years of treating patients for serious sex and Internet addictions, Dr. David Greenfield said he has never seen a case like that of Greenwich investor Stephen Dent, who became a repeated victim of extortion after interacting with women he met online.
"I've seen people get into hot water legally and in relationships, but I have not seen this specific type of situation," said Greenfield, a nationally recognized addiction specialist who has a practice in West Hartford. "This is a new one."
Dent was a frequent visitor of the "sugar daddy dating site" SeekingArrangement.com, where he would meet younger women and engage them in online, and in some cases, face-to-face relationships. Those relationships led Dent to become the victim of at least three separate extortion plots, police said, but they didn't stop him from continuing to use the site until recently -- something that did not surprise Greenfield.
"It's very consistent with any addiction," said Greenfield. "One of the markers of an addiction is it has some consequence on your life, and in spite of that, there are still urges and cravings."
Becoming addicted to the Internet, in particular, is easy, Greenfield said, because it is an extremely accessible medium.
"Accessibility is one of the major highlights of Internet addiction," said Greenfield. "There is an ease of access and an immediate gratification in the form of whatever it is you are searching for."
Greenfield is one of a handful of specialists in the country who focus specifically on Internet addiction and is the director for the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction, based in West Hartford. Greenfield is also an assistant clinical professor at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and has authored several books on addiction.
Although Dent's actions may have started as harmless Internet flirting, chatting with women online and swapping photos, it quickly landed him in dangerous territory, according to police reports. Dent reportedly spent more than $200,000 on women, in some instances for casual sex.
Greenfield said there is a very thin line between sex and Internet addiction, as is evident in Dent's case, because in today's society, the two often go hand in hand.
"We can't really talk about sex addiction today without talking about the Internet," said Greenfield. While there are major distinctions between different types of addictions whether they stem from drugs, alcohol, the Internet or sex, Greenfield said they all have one thing in common -- dopamine, a chemical in the brain that can be elevated by pleasurable activity.
"All addictions function very similar on a neurological level," said Greenfield. "They all elevate dopamine. Dopamine is really what the brain is addicted to. How it gets its drug of choice is what varies."
Greenfield said that studies his center has conducted often find it is the Internet that turns people toward sex addiction by activating a hidden predisposition to it. As a result, it is actually quite common for people who have no history of this compulsive behavior to become entranced by the virtual reality they experience online.
Greenfield noted that much of the sexual dysfunction seen in the country today has to do with the way society promotes and shames sex all at the same time -- a conflicting message that pushes many addicts into the shadows.
"There is a consequence when you sort of say it's OK to sell sex but if you want it outside of the normal or healthy way to do it, there is something wrong with you," said Greenfield. "I'm not excusing it. But our culture is absolutely ripe for producing this kind of behavior."
While Dent's lawyer said the Greenwich investor is moving forward with the support of his family, Greenfield said it takes a serious commitment to break the cycle of compulsion. In his experience, patients often require treatment from a therapist to help them understand addiction and, in some cases, even require medication. Since treating Internet addiction is a relatively new field, Greenfield said the science is constantly evolving.
"Addictions are more powerful than logic, so these events may be enough to break his denial, but it's not enough to cure the problem," Greenfield said. "He will still need some help."
And while many people view drug and alcohol addictions as having the most severe consequences on a person's life, Greenfield said this is a prime example of the devastating results of sex and Internet addictions.
"I can't tell you how many cases I've dealt with where there was a tremendous impact to their lives," said Greenfield. "They are completely turned upside down."
..News Source.. by Denra Friedman, STAFF WRITER
April 10, 2009
FBI Targets Scammers Posing as Minors to Target Would-Be Pedophiles
4-10-2009 National:
Sexual predators who victimize children on the Internet are now becoming targets of a different kind of online predator – and law enforcement officials are hunting them all down.
In the past five years, federal authorities have arrested more than 11,000 "online predators," at least in part as a result of officers posing as minors on the Internet to attract would-be pedophiles. But the FBI is increasingly seeing cases of computer-savvy scammers posing as minors online to steal financial information or extort money from those would-be pedophiles.
This claim of "11,000 online predators" is misleading, read carefully, "at least in-part" which means most of the 11,000 had nothing to do with sex crimes. To understand this better folks need to know that, as to online crimes against children, the FBI is one of many agencies that form the ICAC Task Force. A recent Press Release by them explained they handle more than "Internet Sex Crimes," in fact, their Press Release shows "children who were victims of some form of abuse or neglect," neglect being a non sex crime. Further, within that 11,000 number are cases of "child pornography" who are caught by the fact that they get the CP, online, hence cases are handled by the ICAC, of which the FBI is part of. So, 11,000 online predators is clearly intended to mislead the public!
The FBI is currently investigating a man and woman in Miamisburg, Ohio, who allegedly engaged seven men, including a middle school teacher in New York, in sexually explicit conversations on the Internet and then "tricked" them into divulging personal information and financial records, according to court documents obtained by Fox News.
The man and woman also allegedly tried to extort money from some of the men by threatening to reveal the men's sexually explicit conversations online, according to the court documents.
"This is definitely not the first of its kind," one FBI official said. There have been "several instances where the same activity was done to blackmail would-be offenders into sending money to the perpetrators," he said.
Interesting, a past case of extortion, exactly as described above, was also a couple out of Ohio extorting money from sex offenders over the Internet. And, there were other cases here and here.
(eAdvocate Post)
In the Ohio case, the couple under investigation engaged "a large number" of men last year in sexually explicit conversations over the Yahoo! instant messaging service, according to court documents. The couple allegedly sent images of female models to the men, who believed they were talking to the girls in the photos. But the couple also sent files to the men that, once opened and executed, gave "full and unauthorized access to [their] computer system," according to court documents.
"The subjects had gained access to the usernames and passwords to various Web sites accessed by the target males, including eBay, PayPal, and Deutsche Bank," court documents said. "The PayPal and eBay Web sites can store information about a user's bank accounts and credit cards. By gaining access to users' PayPal and eBay usernames and passwords, a subject could access and transfer funds from users' bank accounts and credit cards."
A Latin teacher at Edward Town Middle School in Sanborn, N.Y. was allegedly one of the couple's victims. The teacher had engaged in a sexually explicit conversation with someone he thought was a minor, but he was actually talking to what court documents called an "intruder."
"The intruder threatened to send a video detailing the conversations to ... Edward Town Middle School if [the teacher] failed to comply with the subject's demands," court documents said.
Shortly after the teacher told the "intruder" he did not have "sufficient resources" to comply with the demand, someone logged on to the school's internal system — using the teacher's username and password — and posted a link to the teacher's sexually explicit conversation.
The FBI has interviewed the teacher, but no federal charges have been filed against him, according to a search of court records.
In February, FBI agents raided the couple's home, after tracking the "intruder" to the home. Fox News has decided not to name the couple. In executing a search warrant, they seized computers and "computer related equipment," according to court documents.
FBI agents returned to the home last week, taking with them a desktop computer system that had a large "cartoon girl's face" on the front of it.
Charges have yet to be filed against anyone in the home, but a law enforcement official said charges could be coming.
It's unclear whether a motive in the case would be to obtain money or to punish pedophiles. But Paul Bresson, an FBI spokesman in Washington, said extortion cases often target people who are "particularly vulnerable."
"In a case like this, I suppose exposing someone for being [involved with] child pornography fits that bill," he said.
Hey, why presume CP fits the bill, when they targeted financial account? Seems like the presumption is completly wrong, unless it is the intent of the FBI to go for a CP conviction; better headlines than financial ones.
Asked whether he thought authorities should be easier on those who target pedophiles and other criminals, Bresson declined to comment, insisting, "Those are more prosecutorial decisions."
FBI officials in Washington and in other parts of the country didn't know exactly how many such cases they've worked on involving pedophiles being targeted online, but one official said "several offices" across the country have investigated similar crimes.
In 2002 the FBI arrested three men in Kentucky for extorting money from men who visited a "fake" child-pornography Web site, according to an FBI official.
The men hacked into their victims' computers and demanded money, insisting that if they didn't comply authorities would be notified that they visited a child-pornography site.
Twenty-one people from across the country sent the men money, totaling nearly $8,000 in two months, according to an Associated Press report at the time.
Attorneys for the three men said their goal was to target child pornographers and punish them. ..News Source.. by Mike Levine
